A married immigrant couple followed their attorney’s instructions to wait for her arrival when they were stopped near their Massachusetts home by federal immigration officers Monday.

Juan Francisco-Mendez and Marilu Domingo-Ortiz remained calm and composed as they kept the windows rolled up, with Francisco-Mendez holding his hands in his lap. Domingo-Ortiz grabbed her phone to film the encounter.

The couple indicated they wanted the attorney, Odine Galvez-Sniffin, to be there before they complied with instructions, the attorney told HuffPost.

The officers, however, became increasingly restless. At one point, the video shows one of them tell the couple they can do things the “easy” way or the “hard” way.

Moments later, Domingo-Ortiz captured another of the agents violently smashing the passenger-side rear window of the car with a sledgehammer in order to gain access to the lock, the couple’s stillness contrasting with the agents’ frenzied movements.

The pair were then pulled from the vehicle so Francisco-Mendez could be detained, said Galvez-Sniffin, who represents both individuals. By the time she arrived — within about 30 minutes — Francisco-Mendez was being driven away in a government vehicle.

“Ayúdame!” he shouted, meaning “help me” in Spanish.

Domingo-Ortiz told the New Bedford Light, which first reported the story, that the officers “pulled us out violently.”

“They treated us very harshly,” she told the outlet, adding: “Imagine if a child had been in that car.”

A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed the arrest and endorsed the amount of force used.

“Juan Francisco-Mendez, 29, is an illegally present Guatemalan alien who was detained by ICE Boston in New Bedford, Massachusetts, April 14. During the course of his arrest, he refused to comply with officers’ instructions and resisted apprehension,” the spokesperson said.

“ICE concurs with the actions deemed appropriate by the officers on the scene who are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve the situation in a manner that ensures the success of the operation and prioritizes the safety of our officers,” they said.

Galvez-Sniffin told HuffPost that the officers initially asked Francisco-Mendez if he knew someone called Antonio who lived in the same apartment building, and her client said he did not know anyone by that name. When Galvez-Sniffin arrived on the scene, she approached a federal agent and tried without success to explain that they had arrested the wrong person.

ICE declined to respond to a question about whether the agents could have mistaken Francisco-Mendez for someone else.

Both Domingo-Ortiz and Francisco-Mendez are from Guatemala; she and the couple’s 9-year-old child were granted asylum status last year, Galvez-Sniffin said. Francisco-Mendez, who arrived separately from his wife and child, had been in the process of obtaining asylum and had no criminal record anywhere that Galvez-Sniffin could find through background checks. Federal officials said they did not know when or where Francisco-Mendez entered the country.

“The problem is, he came in before she did, so he was not in proceedings with her and that’s why he was not able to obtain the status simultaneously. But there is a process by which, once she has it, she can then pass it to him,” the attorney told HuffPost. That process was in motion when her client was abruptly detained.

He is being held at a correctional facility in Dover, New Hampshire, with a hearing scheduled in May. Galvez-Sniffin said she was able to speak with him Wednesday.

The couple’s child was in school at the time of the standoff.

“They’re overwhelmed,” the attorney said of the family. “It’s very hard for Marilu … She was recently laid off from her job, and so Juan was the primary breadwinner, and now he’s going to be out of work for three weeks, so he’s probably going to lose that job.”

Francisco-Mendez had been working at one of New Bedford’s waterfront fisheries.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell (D) told reporters Wednesday that city officials have been kept in the dark about the operation.

“The problem we have is that we just don’t get good information out of ICE — information that I think the residents of our city are entitled to,” Mitchell said.

He cited President Donald Trump’s assertion that federal authorities were going to prioritize deporting immigrants with criminal histories, but noted that ICE has not said whether or not they believe Francisco-Mendez has a criminal past.

“If the administration is interested in legitimizing what it is doing, it should communicate,” he said.

“Why did they have to resort to breaking the window?” Mitchell asked at another point. “They said the attorney was a half-hour away. So why the escalation?”

Mitchell said in a statement on social media that ICE had recently broken from its “long-standing practice” of informing the local police department of raids, adding that local officers can help manage the situation and diffuse tensions.

It was not clear, the mayor wrote, whether the Trump administration was simply “engaging in an indiscriminate roundup of individuals with uncertain immigration status.”

Asked why the officials went ahead with Francisco-Mendez’s arrest when he said he did not know anyone by the name of Antonio, Galvez-Sniffin said, “In my opinion, they’re filling quotas.”

“They weren’t about to do a back-step. They weren’t about to go backwards once they realized this wasn’t the person,” she said.

Galvez-Sniffin said she told her clients the agents were likely bluffing when they threatened to break a window to access the car, believing they were just trying to scare the couple.

“I myself did not believe that they would go to those extremes,” the attorney said.